Nature blog
The students in my “Nature Writing in the West” class have started blogging. Read their thoughts at Nature Blog.
Now to crack the whip over them: more posts! more links!
I am adding Natureblog to my links list.
What is Wrong with a Moon God, Anyway?
The fun-loving gang at Chick Publications have a new one, Allah had no Son, which offers evangelical Christians Chick’s comic-book take on the notion that Allah was originally an Arabic Moon god, which, I suppose, makes Islam a sort of failed polytheism. Thanks to Allah himself for the link.
You will find a bibliographic essay on the “Was Allah a Moon God?” issue here, which cites most of the dubious texts out there. (It’s a Christian apologetics site.)
The ubiquity of Chick’s little booklets once led Tim/Otter/Oberon Zell of the Church of All Worlds and Pete Davis of the Aquarian Tabernacle to create their own small series of Pagan anti-tracts, done in the same style and format. The first, The Other People, took the approach that since most Western Pagans consider themselves to be neither literal nor metaphorical “children of Abraham,” all those Middle Eastern holy books simply do not apply to us.
Chick also champions the anti-Wiccan, anti-Masonic writer Bill Schnoebelen, dealt with effectively here.
Some Hae Meat
On Saturday the 24th of January, a colleague invited me and the notorious M.C. to the “Burns Nicht Supper,” an annual event in many locations around the world, celebrating the birthday of the Scottish poet Robert Burns. Go here for a typical evening’s program, Alberta version.
“You’ll see,” she said. “The Presbyterians provide the organization, and the Pagans provide the music and energy” . . . or words to that effect.
I tied on my dress Gordon necktie (Victorian invention, all that specific clan tartan stuff); the notorious M.C. combed her red hair and dressed in black, and off we went, to the dining hall of The Retired Enlisted Association in Colorado Springs, a suitably banner-hung and martial venue. Aside from one singer/guitarist and his companion, who set off my . . . what’s the Pagan equivalent of “gaydar”? . . . I would say that the Presbyterian influence dominated the evening.
All the elements were there: the haggis was piped, the toasts were drunk, and the wee laddies and lassies danced around basket-hilted broadswords as large as they were. I give the Scottish Society of the Pike’s Peak Region credit for this: they are not afraid to let children handle large edged weapons. Imagine such a thing in a public school in this safety-crazed age.
But eventually it all wore on us, and we slipped away before “Auld Lang Syne” was sung, pleading the long drive home.
The same Scottish Society of the Pike’s Peak Region will be “kirkin’ the tartan” in our former home of Manitou Springs come April 3. A little research reveals that this seemingly ancient “tradition” was invented early on in World War II to build American support for the British cause, in the months before the Pearl Harbor attack brought us into the war. Now it has become a major American and Canadian tourist event: here is one example from Nova Scotia.
As for the Pagans, I think that they are at the Highland Games that are spreading everywhere.
A strike against spammers
Here is some good news on the anti-spam front: a group of Nigerian and Beninese (Beninian?) spammers nailed in Amsterdam. But, reading the article, I was surprised to learn of the hoodwinked Swiss professor, which damages my stereotype of the Swiss–educated ones, at least–being financially canny.
Think your look is unique?
Think again.
A common Anglo-Saxon name
This (third name on list) is not me. I do not write poems about my toes. Or maggots. Not that I’ve got anything against maggots.
The Rosvellov Incident
Now the story can be told . . . in Pravda, apparently taking its journalistic lead from the supermarket tabloids, which, as we all know, are staffed Florida-loving expatriate British journalists fired from their UK jobs for excessive-even-by-Fleet-Street-standards drunkeness:
In the beginning of August 1987 five soldiers of Leningrad Military District went to the North of Karelia region on a special mission. They were required to guard the object of unknown origin. It was found on the territory of another military unit near the town of Vyborg. The item was 14 meters long, 4 meters wide, 2.5 meters high.
His name’s not George (unless it really is)
Although it is a bit off this blog’s stated purpose, I have published earlier (here and here) on the joy of transcontinental travel by Amtrak sleeping car.
Sometimes I think of what were the glory days of train travel, when the Pullman Company owned the sleeping cars (leasing them to railroads) and hired the attendants — “porters,” as they were called then — freed black slaves at first, in the latter part of the 19th century.
But the relationship between the porters and the company was far from simplistic. By 1925, the Pullman Company was the largest single employer of blacks in the nation, and the company’s involvement in communities as a good corporate citizen, especially its contributions to black churches, had bought it considerable goodwill among influential black leaders, particularly the ministers in the big churches in large cities. Well-placed advertisements in black newspapers helped as well. Recipients of the company’s largess were loath to call for organized opposition to their benefactor.
They were paid less than white railway workers, of course, and they not only had to serve but to be subservient as well. Hence, in the 1920s, they struggled to unionize as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a “craft union” that would eventually, in the 1930s, become part of the American Federation of Labor.
For that story, you might look for a made-for-television (Showtime channel) movie, “10,000 Black Men Named George,” starring Andr? Braugher as organizer Philip Randolph and Mario Van Peebles as one of his associates. Charles S. Dutton’s character helps earn the film an “R” rating. Sure, it’s a TV movie and it’s a little two-dimensional and cleaned up, but how many such movies on labor history are there?
His name’s not George (unless it really is)
Although it is a bit off this blog’s stated purpose, I have published earlier (here and here) on the joy of transcontinental travel by Amtrak sleeping car.
Sometimes I think of what were the glory days of train travel, when the Pullman Company owned the sleeping cars (leasing them to railroads) and hired the attendants — “porters,” as they were called then — freed black slaves at first, in the latter part of the 19th century.
But the relationship between the porters and the company was far from simplistic. By 1925, the Pullman Company was the largest single employer of blacks in the nation, and the company’s involvement in communities as a good corporate citizen, especially its contributions to black churches, had bought it considerable goodwill among influential black leaders, particularly the ministers in the big churches in large cities. Well-placed advertisements in black newspapers helped as well. Recipients of the company’s largess were loath to call for organized opposition to their benefactor.
They were paid less than white railway workers, of course, and they not only had to serve but to be subservient as well. Hence, in the 1920s, they struggled to unionize as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a “craft union” that would eventually, in the 1930s, become part of the American Federation of Labor.
For that story, you might look for a made-for-television (Showtime channel) movie, “10,000 Black Men Named George,” starring Andr? Braugher as organizer Philip Randolph and Mario Van Peebles as one of his associates. Charles S. Dutton’s character helps earn the film an “R” rating. Sure, it’s a TV movie and it’s a little two-dimensional and cleaned up, but how many such movies on labor history are there?
His name’s not George (unless it really is)
Although it is a bit off this blog’s stated purpose, I have published earlier (here and here) on the joy of transcontinental travel by Amtrak sleeping car.
Sometimes I think of what were the glory days of train travel, when the Pullman Company owned the sleeping cars (leasing them to railroads) and hired the attendants — “porters,” as they were called then — freed black slaves at first, in the latter part of the 19th century.
But the relationship between the porters and the company was far from simplistic. By 1925, the Pullman Company was the largest single employer of blacks in the nation, and the company’s involvement in communities as a good corporate citizen, especially its contributions to black churches, had bought it considerable goodwill among influential black leaders, particularly the ministers in the big churches in large cities. Well-placed advertisements in black newspapers helped as well. Recipients of the company’s largess were loath to call for organized opposition to their benefactor.
They were paid less than white railway workers, of course, and they not only had to serve but to be subservient as well. Hence, in the 1920s, they struggled to unionize as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a “craft union” that would eventually, in the 1930s, become part of the American Federation of Labor.
For that story, you might look for a made-for-television (Showtime channel) movie, “10,000 Black Men Named George,” starring Andr? Braugher as organizer Philip Randolph and Mario Van Peebles as one of his associates. Charles S. Dutton’s character helps earn the film an “R” rating. Sure, it’s a TV movie and it’s a little two-dimensional and cleaned up, but how many such movies on labor history are there?